A Sunken Bench - Baseball's Signature Structure
Soccer benches sit at pitch level. Basketball benches line the courtside. Baseball is the only sport where a sunken team bench became the standard: professional ballparks typically place the dugout floor below the playing surface. Strictly speaking, baseball holds no monopoly on the idea - Pittodrie Stadium in Scotland gave soccer a below-pitch dugout as early as the 1920s - and not every baseball bench is sunken either, as amateur and multi-purpose ballparks often keep theirs at field level. No rule prescribes how deep a dugout must be; the depth is left to each ballpark's design. The sunken layout gives the dugout its name: literally, a space that has been dug out.
The Primary Reason - Protecting Spectator Sightlines
The dugout is recessed primarily to preserve spectator views. Front-row fans along the first and third base lines sit directly behind the dugout. If the bench were at field level, seated players and coaches would block views of ground balls, baseline plays, and infield action. The sunken design keeps bench occupants below the spectator sightline, ensuring unobstructed views of the playing field.
Player Safety - Foul Ball Protection
The recessed design also reduces foul ball injury risk. Line-drive fouls frequently rocket toward the bench area; a below-grade dugout allows many of these to pass overhead. Protective fencing along the dugout's front edge provides additional shielding. While dugout injuries still occur occasionally, the sunken structure significantly reduces their frequency.
Early 20th-Century Origins - The Bench Started at Ground Level
The sunken dugout was not there from baseball's beginning. Early professional ballparks solved the sightline problem the other way around, elevating the seating areas so that benches could stay at field level - a photograph of Chicago's West Side Park taken in 1905 still shows a plain bench standing on the ground. Sunken benches spread in the early 20th century: a 1908 newspaper story described the dug-in players' benches as newfangled equipment, and dictionaries record the baseball sense of 'dugout' from the 1910s. Those early dugouts were indeed physically excavated, giving the structure its literal name. Modern dugouts are engineered concrete structures, but the name preserves the memory of those early earthworks.
"Daguauto" and "Dakkuauto" - Why the Japanese Spellings Vary
The word is a katakana rendering of the English "dugout", and Japanese uses three spellings for it: daguauto, dagguauto and dakkuauto. Copying the sound of "dug out", meaning dug into the ground, gives daguauto, but Japanese habitually inserts a small pause after a short English vowel, so the spelling dagguauto also became widely established. On top of that, dakkuauto, in which the voiced gu is devoiced to ku, is far from rare in speech and in writing.
Broadcasters, newspapers and books differ over which spelling they use, and none of them is wrong. All of them point to the same thing: the players' bench dug one level below the field. This article uses daguauto consistently, but when searching or working through the literature, any of the three spellings will lead to the same subject.
Home Side vs. Visitor Side
In NPB, the home team customarily occupies the first-base dugout and visitors take the third-base side - a convention, not a rule. Koshien Stadium follows it too: the Hanshin Tigers, as the home team, use the first-base dugout, leaving the third-base side to visitors. In MLB, each team chooses its preferred side based on sun exposure, bullpen access, and clubhouse proximity, and some parks, such as Dodger Stadium, put the home team on the third-base side. The choice is a practical decision with no universal rule.
The Dugout as Baseball's Backstage
The dugout functions as the backstage to the field's stage. Players wait for their entrance, managers direct from the wings, coaches review data in the shadows. Television cameras capturing dugout moments give viewers a backstage pass to raw emotion: a manager's grimace, teammates' encouragement, a frustrated batter slamming his helmet. That this backstage sits physically below the stage echoes theatrical architecture where wings and pits occupy lower ground. The dugout's sunken design may transcend mere sightline engineering to constitute the spatial grammar that makes a ballpark a theater.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. Which is correct, daguauto or dagguauto?
Both are variant katakana renderings of the English "dugout" and the meaning is the same. Broadcasters, newspapers and books differ over the spelling, but what the word points to does not change.
Q. Where is the dugout?
There is one on the first-base side and one on the third-base side. In NPB the home team generally uses the first-base side, and at Koshien Stadium too the Hanshin Tigers are on the first-base side. In MLB the choice is left to each club, and there are parks such as Dodger Stadium where the home team uses the third-base side.
Q. What is dakkuauto?
It is one of the spelling variants of daguauto, from the English "dugout", and the meaning is the same. Daguauto, dagguauto and dakkuauto all refer to the players' bench dug below the level of the field.